His Princess
by Cloud-Dee
Summary: Gwaine loves many things. He loves taverns, fights and quests. He loves the thrill, the excitment and the adventure. What Gwaine doesn't love is women. He lusts them yes, but he doesn't love. He won't let himself. He knows what love can do...   One-shot


His Princess

Gwaine loves taverns. He loves getting drunk and he loves getting into fights. Gwaine loves his friends. He loves the dangerous quests and the constant thrill. He loves the laughter and the cheer. Gwaine loves his life. What Gwaine doesn't love is women. He lusts them yes, but he doesn't love. He won't let himself. He knows what love can do.

He was only a child when his father died, so his memories are almost non-existent. But he does have a vague feeling of warmth and comfort, his sister sitting beside him and his mother's face smiling and happy. This is when he knows he's dreaming because his mother never smiled like that. She never laughed like that, so care-free and loving. He can't picture his father, not even the vaguest memory. But he knows he must have been a good, kind man to make his mother smile in that way. And that's why he will never fall in love.

Because he doesn't want to ever end up like his mother. He doesn't want to care enough about someone that to lose them would be unbearable. Because you will lose them in the end. And that is something Gwaine could never face.

He couldn't remember the time his father went off to war. He only had a feeling of great unease and anxiety. But he knew what had come after. His sister, Elizabeth, was a full four years older than him and she had told him the story many times, mostly in bitter tones of hate and regret. His father had ridden off one day, and had never come back. His mother had never recovered. She became a shadow of herself, still living but only just, and only for her children. If they hadn't been there, if she hadn't loved them with her whole heart, then she may have just given up and died. But she hadn't.

She had pleaded with the king. She had begged for his help but none came. So she had had to watch as her children became thinner and paler, their cheekbones sharpening and their ribs starting to show through their skin. They had nothing left. The house had been taken; their remaining money had run out. They would have had to live like beggars on the street were it not for the help from a most unlikely source.

In the end they were saved by a servant, someone they had previously looked down on all their lives. Mary, a kindly woman with no children of her own had taken them in out of the kindness of her heart, unable to see her previous mistress and her children starve. She had very little money and for a time all seemed hopeless. But it was Gwaine's mother who eventually turned the tables and started to bring their lives around again.

For months she had been unable to find work. People sneered at her birth-right, knowing that no noble could ever put in a hard day's labour. She was turned down and shunned, rejected for the birth that should have granted her rights. But she persevered, learning skills from Mary, cooking, cleaning and sewing. In the end she was granted a job, a small job, but a job none the less. And for the first time in Gwaine's memory his life began to look up.

They led a humble existence, working, eating, living. They were still poor but they scraped through. During one bitterly cold winter, Mary passed away, and though they mourned, she had left everything to them, her house, her small savings. So they were reasonably happy.

But Gwaine's mother was so tired. She worked long before Gwaine and Elizabeth awoke and came home, exhausted and drained, long after they had returned from playing in the streets. Still she would not rest, but insisted that they sit for hours every night, learning the skills they would have been taught by a tutor had things turned out differently. Reading, writing, numbers. Gwaine complained of course, not seeing the point.

"One day Gwaine, you'll be grateful. One day you'll get back what is rightfully yours and we can live in comfort again. As nobles."

It was on that day that Gwaine decided that whatever he did, he would never be a noble. It was a word that haunted his whole life, sneered at him in the streets by the older boys. Of course that was before he learned to fight. Then they shut up and left him alone, like he wanted. He would come home with ripped and dirty clothes, a black eye and a huge grin, which was soon wiped off as he was repeatedly told off by his mother, his sister looking smugly on.

It was around his tenth birthday that he first learned of the circumstances that had led to his life as he knew it. He had often wondered, in the depths of the night when he heard the muffled sounds of sobs coming from his mother's bed, what could possibly make her so sad. He knew he didn't have a father, but he didn't miss him. He couldn't miss someone he had never known.

It was his sister who first told him the story, of how they used to be rich and powerful, and live like kings. And then his father had gone off to fight, and had died in a blaze of glory, leaving them to the mercy of the king. Here her face twisted into a mock of a smile, and she told of how their great king had turned them away and left them penniless and alone.

"That's why Mother cries at night. She misses father. She loved him with all her heart and now he's gone. I don't want to ever fall in love. It hurts too much."

Gwaine agreed, and though he did not know it, it was then that he closed off his heart, wrapping it in a protective wall, keeping it locked away from the pain of love. And so the next stage of his life began.

It was in the winter of the year he was fourteen when it happened. The winter was bitterly cold, the frost seeming to creep under your skin and settle on your bones. There was not enough money to buy more than a few logs of firewood to last them for days and the house was only fractionally warmer than the snow-covered fields outside. Both Gwaine and Elizabeth fell ill, raging fevers and hallucinations, burning up one minute and freezing the next.

The local doctor came but there was nothing he could do. He prescribed warmth but there was none to be had. He prescribed food, both children were lean to the point of being malnourished, but there was no money left. The doctor left shaking his head, his eyes bowed. They would not last the night.

Some say it was a miracle. Some say it was a gift from God. But others said it was their mother, who kept them alive through sheer force of will, refusing to lose anyone else in her life. She nursed them night and day, until first Gwaine, and soon after Elizabeth regained a sense of reality and began to slowly recover. For a time it seemed that all would be well.

But the hours of work, the constant nursing and the freezing weather took its toll. Suddenly it was not her children but herself who was sick, and this time there really was no recovery. On the night before her death, Gwaine's mother called her children round her bed and spoke to them, telling them how much she loved them and how much she would miss them when she was gone.

"You're not going to die. You're not! Please don't die." Gwaine was pleading with his eyes as well as his mouth, begging not to be left alone in the world for the second time in his short life.

"Gwaine listen to me. Please. I have to leave you, like your father did. I don't have a choice. But I need you to be strong. Be strong for your sister. You have to live, both of you. You have to live. I'll see you again one day, just make it a long way from now."

She reached beside her bed and drew out a piece of cloth, two objects wrapped in the centre.

"Take…take these." Her voice was fading now, and her body being taken over by violent shivers. "Our…our wedding rings. Your father's and mine. Take them and never let them go. That way we'll still be with you. Always." She gave one last shiver and then lay still on her bed, her breath dying away for the last time. The last thing she said was directed straight to Gwaine, her eyes locked on his and her voice determined to tell him one last thing.

"Be strong Gwaine. Never give up. Even when everything seems hopeless be strong. I believe in you. I believe in you both. I know you will make me proud." Then her eyes slipped closed and Gwaine was left alone for the second time in his life, with nothing but a single ring and a final message. "Never give up." He never does.

But that day he realised there were three things he would promise himself never to do, as long as he lived. He would never become a noble. He would never work for royalty. And he would never fall in love. It hurts to lose someone you love. It hurts too much.

It was after his mother died that Gwaine's life became almost unbearable once again. He had tried to find work, he really had. His sister took up her Mother's sewing, having been taught for many years. But Gwaine had nothing. All he could do was fight. And anywhere he went to find a job, he was turned away, that dreaded word _Noble_ hissed on the lips of all.

Life had hit an all-time low. But a few years later he discovered the tavern. A new exciting place where no-one judged you on how you were born, just how much you could drink and if they wanted you on their side in a fight. It was a better life, an escape.

"You're useless. All you ever do is drink and fight. Where did all the money go! I earned that and you wasted it. You don't deserve to wear that ring of our father's. If he could see you now he would be ashamed. You're defiling our parent's memory! You'll drink us out of our house and home, the home Mary left us. Is this how you thank her? It would have been better if you had never been born. Why don't you just leave? Leave and never come back!"

His sister's words bit into him like knifes, and his hand reached up to grasp the ring he wore around his neck, clutching it like the memory of his father could give him some kind of reassurance. But he couldn't escape the truth. And it was true, every word. But that didn't mean he wanted to hear it.

"Fine. I'll leave. You obviously don't want me. You never have. But you are my sister so in honour of our parent's memory, I'll make you one last promise. You'll never see me again. Ever!" He stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him, making the whole house quake. He stomped up the stairs, fuming. He would go away, far away from this place, where nobody knew him, where he could escape that hated word noble, his horrible toad-faced sister with all her high and mighty talk, and the ghosts of his parents that still haunted his every move.

So that was why, in the dead of night when he was just seventeen years old, Gwaine packed his bags, slipped out of the house, and left his hometown forever. He would never come back, he promised himself. There was no point. There was nothing left for him there anymore. Little did he know that every day, his sister sat and waited, bitterly regretting her last words and praying that one day her brother would come home.

Gwaine travelled. He grew to drink and fight, earning money here and there, always moving on. It was around then that he first discovered women. He had noticed them before of course, but never in that way. And at home he had always been the shamed noble, the drunken nobody who would never amount to much. But now he was the tall, dark, handsome stranger and he suddenly found he got a lot of attention. Female attention. And he liked it.

Sometimes he would stay. Sometimes he would find a woman he genuinely liked and would stay for a few weeks, a month at most. But as soon as he felt his heart begin to beat faster, and the treacherous beginnings of love creep into the edge of his mind, he would pack his bag and leave, in the middle of the night, a trail of broken hearts following in his wake.

For years Gwaine moved. Always traveling, never looking back. And then one day he met two strangers in a bar, one dark and one blonde, and his life changed forever. He finally had a friend. And as the time passed he had two. And then came that fatefully day when he had met them again, in a slave trader's prison of all places, and he broke two of the rules he had set for himself so many years ago. Sir Gwaine the noble, Serving Prince Arthur of Camelot. And strangely enough, he didn't mind.

Because now he had friends. More than friends, now he had a family of sorts. A group of brotherly knights, an arrogant but good-hearted prince and a gangly clumsy servant who always was and always would be his first and best friend. And know he knew why he had sworn never to fall in love because he had finally found people worth dying for, and if one of them were to die before he did he knew he couldn't bare it. But though he did not know it, the walls that surrounded his heart were beginning to crumble, slowly pulled down by that unexplainable thing called friendship. He had broken the other two rules he lived by. Why not this one?

Gwaine has never fallen in love with a woman. He has never lost his heart and found someone he never wanted to let go. He has never found a woman he would die for. Not yet. The closest he ever came was Gwen. She was sweet and kind, unlike any woman he had met before. He called her his princess. But she already had a love and he was happy for her. He did not love her like Arthur, so he watched as his princess became someone else's queen. And that was fine with him.

Gwaine has never been in love. But even without knowing it his friends have opened up his heart again. Gwaine has never fallen in love but one day he will. One day he will find a woman and never leave her. One day he will find his perfect other half, like in the fairytales. One day, Gwaine will find his real princess.

The End

**Well, this is different. I was in the middle of writing the next chapter for The Hope and Dreams (which includes Gwaine) and he is so awesome he stole my computer and wrote his own story. So here it is! **

**How was it? This is my first independant one-shot so I've got no idea if it's any good or not. Gwaine is a character who has always fascinated me and I wish we had more of his backstory in the show. So this is my version of how he came to be who he is.**

**Any thought? Reviews? I would love you forever if you do. And if not for me do it for Gwaine. Because he is just that awesome.**

**Thanks for reading.**

**Cloud-dee**


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